This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Reconquista is conventionally dated from 711, when Umayyad forces crossed from North Africa and overran the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania within a few years, to 1492, when the Emirate of Granada, the last independent Muslim state on the peninsula, surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Between those two dates lie nearly eight centuries of intermittent warfare, truces, tribute payments and shifting alliances among a changing cast of Christian and Muslim kingdoms, rather than a single continuous campaign.
Christian resistance is traditionally traced to a small victory at Covadonga around 722, from which the kingdom of Asturias, and later Leon, Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal, gradually expanded southward over succeeding centuries, punctuated by long periods of stalemate and by Muslim political consolidation under the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and, later, the North African Almoravid and Almohad empires that periodically reversed Christian gains. The decisive turn came in the thirteenth century, when Christian victories including the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 broke Almohad power and left only the Emirate of Granada as a surviving Muslim state, paying tribute to Castile for over two centuries more.
Granada's fall on January 2, 1492, ended Muslim political rule in Iberia but did not end the story: the same year brought the expulsion of Spain's Jewish population, and forced conversion and eventual expulsion edicts against Iberia's remaining Muslims followed over the following century, closing out a religiously mixed peninsula in favor of one whose new rulers demanded confessional uniformity.